a bibliography of writings by and on Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941)

Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941) is remembered primarily as attracting a Pan-Germanic audience when his early career and most prominent publications actually promoted materials from outside of the classical tradition then being overlooked or ignored. From the list of his students and their topics of study, it is clear that his audience was probably more diverse than most. The list of his publications and his students and their topics of study should give some idea of this. Some of his emphasis was actually typical of his time and place and reflected the growth in popular tourism and travel. His expeditions by camel to photograph remote architecture and sculpture in near eastern areas prone to earthquakes and plagued by armed conflicts have preserved many important examples of art that have since been damaged or lost.

Hans Sedlmayr published two editions of Die Architektur Borrominis in 1930 and 1939 with the second edition reprinted 1973 and 1986. We have followed the first edition but included the preface and essay written for the second edition (in 1939 replacing the original introduction) as an appendix at the end. In what was somewhat unusual for him, he invested his theoretical ideas with the substance of example in what turned out to certainly be quite a multi-facetted career. His most well meaning critics called for him to provide more concrete examples, and among other things, this book stands out for that reason. Among the art historians in the University of Vienna at that time monographic studies were also out of the ordinary.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Julius Schlosser wrote the present essay at an important juncture in his career. It had been approximately a decade since he began lecturing at the university in Vienna and just as it was being published he decided not to accept the chair in Prague, preferring to remain in his position as curator of sculpture in the Hofmuseum, what is now the Kunsthistorisches Museum.He had become an art historian after initially studying philosophy, languages, linguistics and classical archaeology, but always cultivated a broad interest in philosophy and particularly aesthetics. It was never a shallow interest, and his unusual range is also already apparent from his choice of Lucretius and Schelling for the two philosophers in his final examinations upon graduating from the PiaristenGymnasium a few blocks from where he lived with his parents. As a bookworm with a rather fluent knowledge of the classical and modern languages he was able to continue pursuing those interests in a time when the secondary literature was less extensive and the museum did not impose a busy schedule of changing exhibitions.Since Schlosser has recently been said to have 'insured the fame of Riegl', it seems worth putting a finer edge on such generalizations. With the possible exception of his 'dialogue on the art of portraiture' published slightly later in 1906, the present essay states his confrontation with Riegl more clearly than any other.1Alois Riegl's inconsistencies had become a source of contemplation for Schlosser at an early date, and aside from his critical interest in Riegl, these 'glosses on a passage from Montaigne' also reveal Schlosser 's philological acumen and wide reading in the theory of science. In a period of exaggerated politesse, even such veiled criticism must have been very striking in a volume edited by Riegl himself in honor of their friend Franz Wickhoff.Schlosser did not save his personal notes and the correspondence he received, and although his university lectures from 1892 to 1936 seem not to have been particularly clear or simple to follow, he had a consistent and tangible influence on most German-speaking specialists trained during that time. This unusual essay provides a glimpse into what must have been typical asides or digressions during those lectures - which can be assumed to have contributed to books such as Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz's Die Legende vom Kunstler or those devoted to caricature among others. Some readers will recognize a source of inspiration for Ernst Gombrich's Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Art and Illusion.While Schlosser concentrates on the more concrete aspect in the origin of metaphorical motifs, his critical attitude to Riegl kept the view open to the relation of art to the rest of the world, to empirical as well as conceptual reality. This was in line with the program of the Institut fur osterreichische Geschichtsforschung while the idealistic arguments of Riegl were more of a departure from this institution - where along with their colleagues, they had both been trained for archival work. Schlosser articulates his conception of expression as the core impulse of art at a primeval stage, as well as the idea that art is unified by nature and cannot be divided into genres or the scales of 18th century aesthetics. In later writings he occasionally referred to the drawing associated with Villard de Honnecourt depicting a lion frontally and inscribed as done 'al vif ', and otherwise discussed naturalistic imitation which cannot possibly be accepted as such in our usage. Along with topics such as the drawings by Pisanello and more broadly in his book Die Kunst des Mittelalters he frequently demonstrated the comparatively late emergence of actual 'studies from nature' in the arts.2 His thoughts on art as a desire to fix images from the imagination and not a 'mechanical imitation' remained a staple of his entire work.Until the initial publication in the Sitzungsberichte of what would later be developed into Die Kunstliteratur, Schlosser published a sequence of programmatic, and some of them lengthy articles in the Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen. …

It has recently been suggested that at one of the most salient spots of his entire professional career, Alois Riegl was intentionally obscure. In addition to his idiosyncratic sentences and neologisms, more than a century after he was writing, the customary changes of style certainly continue to inhibit many readers. There is no evidence however that he intended to appear ambivalent before his audience. Quite the contrary.His Stilfragen Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik,1 was consistently praised as his finest work by such an insightful and critical associate as Julius Schlosser. In fact, Riegl's argument that artistic creation is a primal human quality without the material prerequisites proposed as necessary by Gottfried Semper is not terribly simple to follow on the basis of the palmettes, rosettes and colloquially named patterns which provide the subject of his book. Yet even in his own time, Riegl's thoughts reached a wider audience than much else in the field, and were taken as seriously as he hoped. This can be seen in the notices and reviews which appeared when his books were first published.2Aside from writing many scores of book reviews in a variety of places, Riegl was an inveterate lecturer before audiences from backgrounds quite different than his later university students who ultimately brought about the revival of his ideas in the interwar period. The present lecture was held before the local anthropological-ethnological society, for whom he also reviewed books. He summarizes his arguments against what he called the materialist theory associated with Gottfried Semper as well as providing an introduction to some of the topics of the Stilfragen.He once described the analysis of stylistic development as the 'backbone' of the history of art, and such examples as his essay about the Ruthenian carpets or the Spatromische Kunstindustrie show how he came to terms with the unavoidable abstraction and teleological conundrum this sometime involves. His interest in the spiral motif among the Maori should make it clear how he felt such analysis might explain gaps in the historical chronology but is necessarily based in empirical reality.His observations about the spiral-motif were not without effect. One of his most perspicacious admirers, Guido Kaschnitz studied the derivation of the spiral in the Aegean region.3Alois Riegl, 'Ornament from New Zealand'4It is no longer possible today to find the so-called primitive cultures in their original state. This is also true of the ornament they use to decorate their objects and weapons. Great care is therefore necessary in studying it, and this is also the reason that so many diverse opinions persist about the origins of decoration and there is so little clarity. If we could only find a cohesive uninterrupted development in an isolated spot! A methodical study might succeed in using the existing monuments incrementally to retrospectively reconstruct and better determine the logical unbroken development with the assistance of the rudimentary elements as they survive. Yet even the condition of a completely isolated chain of development does not seem to exist anywhere on earth. We must make due with cultures relatively uninfluenced and unaffected from the outside. Where such cultures do still exist, the origins of the art of decoration must then be approached in a scholarly way.From what we know, the Maori in New Zealand are such a group whose cultural development has been relatively little influenced by intrusive outside elements. This assumption seems borne out by the fact that they did not use metals at the time they first met with Europeans. In the chronology of human culture, this could lead us to say the Maori had never developed beyond what we use the vague and very relative term to call the 'Stone Age'. Since metals had been in use in other parts of the world for many millennia, we might assume that the Maori had not had contact with the developing cultures during that entire time and that their own culture and art was in no way influenced, prodded or constrained by the others. …

Riegl’s lecture about Maori ornament was held before the Anthropological Society in Vienna in 1890 and anticipates much of what he then said in his Stilfragen. After reiterating his milestone criticism of the ‘materialist’ theories of Semper and his followers, he suggests that the spiral motif was used for more profound and spontaneous reasons at the knee of a figure and the point of a canoe because of its complexity in being read in more than one direction, with and without other intervening elements. It seems to have arisen independently in various places with widely varying climates and cultures.

Earlier theories about the origins of decoration supposed that forms such as the widespread zig-zag motif in ornamental art originated as a ‘naturalistic’ imitation of lightning in the sky or the movements of snakes along the surface of the earth. Evidence exists that actual naturalistic imitation as we know it only became conscious far later and that art originally and more fundamentally expressed feelings or impressions based on such figments as what had been called ‘memory images.’

Alois Riegl is well known to the readers of the present journal for having provided the basis of an art-historical approach independent of the other historical disciplines and of pseudo-science. Readers today often have difficulties in understanding his prose, sometimes considering this to be universal, and at times he is even declaring him to have been intentionally obscure. In fact, he wrote fairly clearly to his contemporaries of the 1850' and simply requires the attentiveness he himself observed in art and life.Riegl himself once used the metaphor of an architectural edifice for historical constructs, and the present review must be admitted to be one of the smaller bricks in his own scheme, but offers a glimpse into a number of his preoccupations. It discusses a popular French publication about art and was written toward the end of his short life - close in time to the publications of his best-known and most celebrated work. It is not particularly opaque in any way, appeared in one of the most widely read daily newspapers in Europe of the time, and conjures up many of Riegl's favorite topics.1 It reminds us how superficial much of the writing of the time was, it evokes the magic term objectivity, refers to philosophical materialism as a thing of the past and shows Riegl's tendency to conceive grand polarities at work in the minutest of phenomena. Here as elsewhere, his adulation of Greek art evokes a potential contradiction to much else in his writings. He ends with the national styles or tendencies and with his conception of ripe moments causing shifts in the preference of one style over another, something like a solo within a piece of music while the other instruments politely recede in volume. He refers to the relation of academic art to nature, and to that of religion to science. He touches on his key idea of 'Stimmung' or 'mood' as a central element in later 19th-century art being viewed at greater distances and providing a reason for the predominance of painting in his time - it is a genre not close to his own specialization and treated far more curtly than the others in his Spatromische Kunstindustrie which was published just a number of months earlier.2He stresses the question of movement and emotion which had come to the fore in the studies of baroque art from his last years, and had provided a persistent problem to theorists before him.* * 3 Movement had been an element in Riegl's analysis from an early date, but since his work centred on ornament and he considered the human form and iconographical questions to distract from the more important problems of the historical analysis of art it has not become apparent to many of his readers.4 Although his grander generalizations are not always convincing, even in such a short review written for popular consumption, Riegl manages to evoke an unusually rich array of questions with an originality that is rare and still striking today.Alois Riegl, 'Objective aesthetics'5Even those who would deny that contemporaries can form an unprejudiced opinion of modern art will be forced to tentatively admit that it is of great historical importance, since this art for the first time in quite a while sees its role as not merely filling the empty spaces on the walls of the rich, but also in fulfilling a general aesthetic need of humanity. Of course the original goal of modern art was nominally no different than any other artistic trend since the renaissance ? re-establishing contact with nature. Although this has barely been underway for twenty-five years, voices are already being heard calling for a return to nature. In the light of recent art, such as the work of Toorop, those who define nature as the average quality in the appearance of things, as we know it from experience, will not be surprised by such demands. Some will be amazed and wonder how nature can revert to such a pure form of unnaturalness within such a short time of being gained. But appearance is well founded since it is based in our ambivalent conception of nature, those things which the visual arts represent or reproduce. …

Classical archaeology is a field associated more with incremental additions and emendations to a nearly universally known corpus of art and architecture than with bold flights of original thought. At the very least, Guido Kaschnitz made a mark in this tradition by analyzing ancient Roman portraiture as art instead of contenting himself with data for iconography, dates and places of origin. After first studying epigraphy and archaeology in his native Vienna under Eugen Bormann and Emil Reisch with a dissertation about the vases from Kerch, it seems significantly to have been the lectures of Max Dvo?ak which kept alive the questions raised by Alois Riegl in the Spatromische Kunstindustrie and related essays. Kaschnitz will remain a significant figure for having reconciled the original definitions of the history of art to the expanding volume of material and the changing knowledge of perception and reality.1 In a review of the 1927 edition of the Spatromische Kunstindustrie, and in his later lectures he developed Riegl's conception of human creativity as it chooses and to some degree forges expressive possibilities and articulated this position as well as further distinctions quite clearly. One chapter of these lectures which we present here, offers an easily accessible example of his approach in going beyond an exclusively empirical registration of facts and figures.2 The Italian peninsula in prehistory and antiquity offers a particularly appealing area for examining the contentious issue of local, regional and national styles, and aside from such a comprehensive survey, Kaschnitz also made an ambitious study, left unfinished at his death, involving a wide-ranging study of all art around the Mediterranean until the end of antiquity.3Guido Kaschnitz has been badly misrepresented to the English speaking audience as a 'radical formalist' whose work is 'hardly read by classical archaeologists'. His catalogue of ancient sculpture in the Vatican storage rooms is most certainly used by classical archaeologists and no director of the Deutsches Archaologisches Institut in Rome can be said to be ignored by their colleagues.4 A short biographical appreciation was published by his wife, the celebrated novelist and poet Marie-Luise Kaschnitz, and the posthumous collected edition of most of his writings was also well received in North America.5 Other testimonials written upon his death at the age of 67, and the work of his students particularly in the field of Roman portrait busts and sarcophagi record the effect of his publications on those subjects.The questions surrounding Roman art and its relative originality had been among the favorite topics of the earliest Austrian art historians, and the conception of 'structure' emerged in various forms quite early on. Even in his monumental study of ancient Roman art, Franz Wickhoff seems affected by the Impressionism of the period.6 By the time of his later writings, Julius Schlosser identified this as an obsolete intellectual phase and delineated a very idiosyncratically refined neo- idealistic point of view using the term expressionism.7 Then alongside Otto Pacht, Kaschnitz became the person to most consistently develop the ideas of Riegl's Spatromische Kunstindustrie for the following generation. During the period after 1945 when there was something of a general retreat into a flat-footed empiricism, Kaschnitz did not avoid such larger questions as the relation of form to content, the relative quality of art, the local, tribal and national styles and conceptions of space, as well as topics such as the originality in Roman art, which are all inevitably necessary to a larger synthesis. Today, the direction of his work seems as inevitable as the renewed scholarly reassessment of Islamic art which gained momentum during his lifetime. Earlier research and scholarship was bound within narrow chronological constraints, disregarded most of the historical evidence, and had been bound by the Romantic idea of freedom. …

Riegl published this short review of a popular book from France in a very widely read Sunday newspaper not long after the Spätrömische Kunstindustrie and Das hollāndische Gruppenporträt appeared. It touches on many of his favorite subjects in what is probably a more palatable presentation than his voluminous publications with more complex analysis.

Riegl as LecturerAlois Riegl (1858-1905) was the most influential of the Viennese art historians from the period when the discipline was being defined there as an academic subject. He should not require an introduction to the readers of these pages. Otto Pacht offered a very succinct explanation of his work to a previously unsympathetic English audience.2 References he himself made to his own publications tell us that he considered it to have been his foremost achievement to have refuted the theories put forth by the followers of Gottfried Semper, who derived artistic forms from the material and techniques with which they were made. Riegl succeeded in demonstrating that one artistic form was based on another as the grounds of an autonomous history of art. A less forward looking aspect of his reflections was an interest in universal history which he shared with Wickhoff. This led him into subjects barely remembered today, but considering his lasting influence the entire work should be borne in mind and generalizations not be based on too narrow a selection.Although his followers have been described as 'radical formalists', Riegl's relatively consistent approach was in fact comprehensive. A number of his essays address strictly iconographical subjects while others involve sociological aspects in the context of universal history. Although this has often been related to an influence from G. W. F. Hegel, he was in fact more interested in the rather different world view of Friedrich Nietzsche, and this is apparent in several of his more popular essays.3His obscure manner of expressing his speculative ideas has always made it difficult to understand them properly. Ludwig Coellen and Walter Passarge misrepresented them as a 'psychological' explanation of art and the tangent taken up by Wilhelm Worringer was recognized and immediately reviewed as such.4 Riegl's famous concept of Kunstwollen was even misinterpreted with a national or racial connotation in lectures published during the 1930's by Karl Maria Swoboda, himself an editor responsible for popularizing Riegl's writings since 1929.5 Guido Kaschnitz and Otto Pacht may be considered as examples of critical and insightful scholars whose lectures and essays have endorsed Riegl and continued his approach.Since obstacles to an understanding of Riegl obviously persist even beyond English-speaking areas, it seems worth recalling that in spite of his inscrutable way of expressing himself, his inconclusiveness and frequent mistakes in dating monuments among other things, he was efficacious as a teacher. The practical application of his particular idealist approach is probably best seen in the book reviews published by his students, primarily in the Kunst geschichtliche Anzeigen. Aside from the fact that much of the best surviving work of Max Dvorak and Hans Tietze is to be found among those reviews, Georg Sobotka, Oskar Poliak, Adalbert Birnbaum and other devoted students left evidence of Riegl's teachings in the criticisms they levelled in those pages against the publications of the time.While the great works such as the Spatromische Kunstindustrie suffered from empirical and other lapses which the author did not survive to emend, his lectures at the university must have inspired a greater seriousness of study which cannot be gleaned from his published work alone.6 The present lecture about art lovers ancient and modem shows his typical speculative nature as it was geared to a broader audience outside the walls of academia.Alois Riegl, 'Uber antike und moderne Kunstfreunde Vortrag gehalten in der Gesellschaft der Wiener Kunstfreunde' - translationOur organizations and clubs are among the most striking phenomena of modem life. What is the reason for this, and what is the nature of this compulsion? The answer is that there is a community of interest. A group of people arrive at the same activity and consider it profitable to pursue the same goal together. …

This paper was originally given as a lecture to the Wiener Kunstfreunde and posthumously published as ‘Über antike und moderne Kunstfreunde Vortrag gehalten in der Gesellschaft der Wiener Kunstfreunde,’ Kunstgeschichtliches Jahrbuch der K. K. Zentral-Kommission zur Erforschung und Erhaltung der kunst- und historischen Denkmale, Volume 1, 1907, Beiblatt für Denkmalpflege, column 1-14, reprinted in Alois Riegl, Gesammelte Aufsätze, Augsburg Vienna: Filser, 1929, 194-206. It defines ‘art lovers’ as collectors/consumers of old art and includes contemporary practicing artists as potential members of that group. The lecture examines the role of the art lover in history, extending from antiquity to the present day. A crux occurred at the end of the nineteenth century when the art of earlier periods is honoured as a temple constructed as an end in itself and not a model for further practice. The emergence Impressionism went hand in hand with the appearance of art lovers as admirers of earlier art on the basis of its age alone. This optical subjectivism is present in the art of the Roman imperial period as well as in modern art. This leads to the question of how optical subjectivism succeeds in arousing, indeed provoking, interest in ancient art. In its effect of conjuring a mood, the contemporary art lovers’ contemplation of earlier art coincides directly with the modern artistic goals of optical subjectivism.

Editor's introduction: Alexander Conze: The Bureaucrat and Art- HistoriographyLike a number of his colleagues, Alexander Conze (Hanover December 10,1831- Berlin July 19,1914), came to classical archaeology after first studying law. His interests and gifts seem to have tended more toward curatorial and administrative work rather than lecturing, and he will be primarily remembered for his part in bringing the Pergamon Altar to the Berlin museums. It may therefore seem ironic that he nevertheless had a great influence as a teacher and probably the greatest influence in another field, which was only later to be defined and brought to fruition in academia by his students as 'the history of art.'For the purposes of art historiography it is therefore significant that after nearly ten years at Halle as Extraordinarius, he was called to the University of Vienna as Ordinarius, taught from 1869 to 1877, where Franz Wickhoff, Alois Riegl, Emanuel Lowy and Julius Schlosser, among others, were influenced by his teachings. In the lectures given by Conze to the Prussian academy later in his career, it is not difficult to recognize a similarity to Schlosser in the binocular attraction of more abstract questions on the one hand and the aesthetic appeal of the individual object on the other. Conze also anticipated and presumably inspired the later studies made by Ernst Garger on the ground in relief sculpture and the historical place of the Monument of the Julii.Conze's theoretical bent towards the origins and early developments of art must have been a primary feature of his lectures in Vienna. There was also an idealistic and bureaucratic aspect to his approach. At the time he was preparing his comprehensive edition of Attic stelae, whilst also inaugurating institutions and serving to sponsor further collective projects. It was during his years in Vienna that he set out on the excavation of Samothrace with two campaigns. Here and later at Pergamon, the ambition was to excavate all parts of a Greek city - something continued by the Austrian excavation of Ephesus. At the university in Vienna he co- founded the Archaologisch-Epigraphisches Seminar with Otto Hirschfeld in 1873 and was instrumental in publishing the Archaologisch-epigraphische Mitteilungen aus Osterreich-Ungarn (continued by the Jahreshefte des Osterreichischen Archaologischen Institutes in Wien). He was succeeded more briefly in this by Hirschfeld and then Eugen Bormann who also hosted the informal meetings of the 'Wiener Eranos' attended by Wickhoff and Riegl as well as publishing the Eranos Vindobonensis from 1893 onwards.1 These meetings became a centre for the definition of objectivity in this and related disciplines. They were also informal and popular and inspired the relative flexibility which later attracted other students with different interests such as Fritz Saxl.2When Conze returned to Berlin in 1877 to become director of the collection of antiquities in the Berlin museums, he became involved with the excavation of the monuments from Pergamon and was instrumental in their installation. They were something of a centrepiece for the Berlin museums and certainly felt to compare with the Elgin Marbles which had inspired him during his travels undertaken after the completion of his studies. At this moment in German political history, soon after the unification of the realm, the curatorial work of the museums was being done in conscious comparison with other national showpieces of various origins, primarily London and Paris, but also Vienna, St. Petersburg and others. The Berlin museums persisted as a centre for scholarship in a way that had not appeared self-evident elsewhere. While ancient Rome had a more natural symbolic resonance for the political undercurrents of the time, Conze stands out for his particular interest in Greece and might to his colleagues have recalled J. J. Winckelmann.In 1887 Conze became secretary of the Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, but also had a hand in founding the Romisch-Germanische Kommission which further reflects his interests in prehistory, with the local traditions and to some degree national flavour. …

Editor's introduction: Alexander Conze: The Bureaucrat and Art- HistoriographyLike a number of his colleagues, Alexander Conze (Hanover December 10,1831- Berlin July 19,1914), came to classical archaeology after first studying law. His interests and gifts seem to have tended more toward curatorial and administrative work rather than lecturing, and he will be primarily remembered for his part in bringing the Pergamon Altar to the Berlin museums. It may therefore seem ironic that he nevertheless had a great influence as a teacher and probably the greatest influence in another field, which was only later to be defined and brought to fruition in academia by his students as 'the history of art.'For the purposes of art historiography it is therefore significant that after nearly ten years at Halle as Extraordinarius, he was called to the University of Vienna as Ordinarius, taught from 1869 to 1877, where Franz Wickhoff, Alois Riegl, Emanuel Lowy and Julius Schlosser, among others, were influenced by his teachings. In the lectures given by Conze to the Prussian academy later in his career, it is not difficult to recognize a similarity to Schlosser in the binocular attraction of more abstract questions on the one hand and the aesthetic appeal of the individual object on the other. Conze also anticipated and presumably inspired the later studies made by Ernst Garger on the ground in relief sculpture and the historical place of the Monument of the Julii.Conze's theoretical bent towards the origins and early developments of art must have been a primary feature of his lectures in Vienna. There was also an idealistic and bureaucratic aspect to his approach. At the time he was preparing his comprehensive edition of Attic stelae, whilst also inaugurating institutions and serving to sponsor further collective projects. It was during his years in Vienna that he set out on the excavation of Samothrace with two campaigns. Here and later at Pergamon, the ambition was to excavate all parts of a Greek city - something continued by the Austrian excavation of Ephesus. At the university in Vienna he co- founded the Archaologisch-Epigraphisches Seminar with Otto Hirschfeld in 1873 and was instrumental in publishing the Archaologisch-epigraphische Mitteilungen aus Osterreich-Ungarn (continued by the Jahreshefte des Osterreichischen Archaologischen Institutes in Wien). He was succeeded more briefly in this by Hirschfeld and then Eugen Bormann who also hosted the informal meetings of the 'Wiener Eranos' attended by Wickhoff and Riegl as well as publishing the Eranos Vindobonensis from 1893 onwards.1 These meetings became a centre for the definition of objectivity in this and related disciplines. They were also informal and popular and inspired the relative flexibility which later attracted other students with different interests such as Fritz Saxl.2When Conze returned to Berlin in 1877 to become director of the collection of antiquities in the Berlin museums, he became involved with the excavation of the monuments from Pergamon and was instrumental in their installation. They were something of a centrepiece for the Berlin museums and certainly felt to compare with the Elgin Marbles which had inspired him during his travels undertaken after the completion of his studies. At this moment in German political history, soon after the unification of the realm, the curatorial work of the museums was being done in conscious comparison with other national showpieces of various origins, primarily London and Paris, but also Vienna, St. Petersburg and others. The Berlin museums persisted as a centre for scholarship in a way that had not appeared self-evident elsewhere. While ancient Rome had a more natural symbolic resonance for the political undercurrents of the time, Conze stands out for his particular interest in Greece and might to his colleagues have recalled J. J. Winckelmann.In 1887 Conze became secretary of the Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, but also had a hand in founding the Romisch-Germanische Kommission which further reflects his interests in prehistory, with the local traditions and to some degree national flavour. …